Voice Mail

Sometimes
the thought occurs to me that perhaps I’ve already died and
have been living in Hell. As much as I’d like to think this
is not true, I am still forced to concede to the following
which I’m sure you’ll agree cause us so much grief, we might
think we are in Hell already.




Voice mail
– how much of our time is wasted each and every day
listening to that dumb little voice which always starts
out…"Your call is important to us, please be patient and
stay on the line. We will answer your call in the order it
was received. Our operators are on the other lines assisting
other customers. We estimate your call will be answered
within ten minutes." First off, how come I’m never, ever the
first person on the line and every one else is waiting? I
mean, do some people get up at five in the morning to call
the phone company or the power company just so they aren’t
placed on hold? Not that it would matter since these folks
don’t start taking calls until about nine o’clock anyway.
This is a little piece of Hell… in my opinion.




Taxes
– have you ever heard of any tax actually going down? All
I’ve ever heard about is how much more they need to fill
their coffers. Not that the service for any governmental
project seems to get any better, it just means more and more
people are working on the same old inefficient agency,
doesn’t it? Someone sent me a quote the other day that said
something along the lines that in some cases throwing more
people into some project or another will not improve their
efficiency. For example, no matter how many women you apply
to the task, it still takes nine months to have a baby. The
same could be said for the government. Another piece of
Hell, we all endure.




Politics
– this is the time of the year, when we start with the
process all over again of determining who will be lesser of
evils in running our country. I don’t care if you’re a
republican or a democrat; they all have their faults and
quirks when you get right down to it. If you go back in
history, I think you’ll find that every presidential
candidate has promised a chicken in every pot and what do we
get? Well, it isn’t a chicken, that’s for sure. Each side
blames the other for anything that goes wrong, and each side
takes credit for everything that goes right. We expect our
candidates to be saints starting at about the age of
accountability or five years old. If they ever cheated at
marbles, then we want to hold them up to the world and
unworthy. On the other hand if our candidate, lied, cheated
and stole, well then it’s of because we shouldn’t be
concerned over his personal integrity. We have at least 8 ½
months more of this daily drudgery to look forward to.
Another piece of evidence that we’re in Hell.




Television
– doesn’t it strike you as odd that we have about 450
channels to choose from and nothing worthwhile to see? I
mean how many times can you watch "Smokey and the bandit"?
Why do we need reruns of Dallas when we already know what
happened to J.R.? Look at the History channel, twenty-four
hours, seven days a week, three hundred sixty five days a
year of old World War Two films. Are we hoping to see a
change? I mean, let’s face it. Germany lost. We won. How
much more of this do I have to see in my lifetime? I think
I’m in Hell.




Decline and fall of the stock market
– do I need to say more? Tell me this isn’t looking like
Hell.




Diets
– the final straw and most sinister of all Hellish devices.
Tell me you haven’t ever been on a diet at some point in
your life. But, which one? We live in the most modern and
best-advanced medical country in the world and we still
can’t get information to tell us if we should eat bread or
not. Is steak good or bad for us? Can I have salt or not
have salt? Will we die if we drink coffee? For every doctor
or scientist telling us that we can eat pasta, there is
another one who says we can’t. Who should we listen to? Who
is telling us the truth? Who knows? Diets alone are enough
to convince me I’m already in Hell.



Of course I may just be wrong and this may only be a preview
of what Hell is actually like. If so, then I need to make
certain my act is straight and I get squared away before my
number comes up. Who’d want to endure this kind of misery
for eternity?